What has happened to TSO?

I have been gone from TSO for about 2 years now,
and just now took a quick curiosity to see how
everything is doing online. But, everything is in EA-Land esque,
and i was wondering (you'd probably be updating me with old info,
but Ive been away for 2 years) what happened to TSO?
Did something called EA Land take it over? I'm really confused.
And now, i cant get back online. Is everything shutting down or what??

EA was on the verge of sending us the 90-day notice about this time last year, when Luc Barthelet stepped up with ideas and plans for turning TSO around and making it profitable again, thus giving the game a stay of execution. As part of the deal, EA made it clear they wanted to put some distance between TSO and their other Sims line, so TSO was renamed to EA-Land. Meanwhile, Luc, Lee Fancey, and more than a dozen other developers went to work completely overhauling the game, updating its aging, archaic code; building in DX9 support for future conversion to Sims2 graphics; brought in custom content; effectively merged all of the production cities into one huge map; introduced free accounts; and worked on a number of anti-bot processes.

Fast-forward to mid-April, 2008. Despite the huge amount of effort and progress that has been made, along with the upswing of subscribership that resulted, EA in their infinite "wisdom" decided things weren't moving fast enough for their liking (as in, miracles didn't literally happen overnight), they forcibly removed the entire dev staff from the project, resulting in a total communication blackout (before this, we were getting news almost daily, with game updates at least weekly) that lasted for two weeks, ending on April 29th with EA's 90-day notice. EA will completely pull the plug on August 1st, 2008. To add insult to injury, even though EA promised us that the subscription for the remaining time will be free, they continue to bill everyone, canceling the accounts of anyone whose billing fails or who removes their billing information to avoid being billed. Many free accounts were terminated with no option to resubscribe. A number of EAL devs quit EA in disgust, and Luc, now free of EA's bureaucracy, is now working on a new game. Nancy Smith, VP of EA's Sims department, effectively pretended that TSO never existed during a recent press interview.

So, there you have it in a nutshell. You should read through the threads in City Hall to get more details about what all has happened since all of this has transpired.

A very bad exploit dumped millions and millions into the game and made a very big mess, that caused a big drop in subscriptions.

Part of the original design team tried to save the game by updating the code, finally bringing in Custom Content, merging the cities into one, and a lot of new features. They got a reprieve for the game last June (EA was set to close it then), if they: turned the game into EA-Land and distanced it from the Sims franchise and brought up the subscription numbers.

But in spite of a jump in membership and a lot of enthusiasum from players, EA Games, abruptly, pulled the plug in April.

Players are seriously PO'ed with the way EA Games handled the whole situation.....and so were many of the design team, some of whom, left the company. (see thread on Tirnua)

The game is shutting down, July 31 is the last day the servers will be operational.

Some links for the longer story:Luc's Blog, for the story of how the redevelopment started and where it was headed.TSO Wiki, where players were invited to create game features with the developers.

Unfortunately Stratics suffered a catastrophic server failure, that we are still trying to recover from, so the old message board threads on these subjects are not currently available.

I have been gone from TSO for about 2 years now,
and just now took a quick curiosity to see how
everything is doing online. But, everything is in EA-Land esque,
and i was wondering (you'd probably be updating me with old info,
but Ive been away for 2 years) what happened to TSO?
Did something called EA Land take it over? I'm really confused.
And now, i cant get back online. Is everything shutting down or what??

Click to expand...

Yeah, they decided to shut it down in August. Then an article dated earlier this month appears saying Sims will have a sociable future.

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